“It’s a really nice looking Bible,” one anonymous source told reporters. “Pastor Adam looks good carrying it up there and setting it down gently and reverently. It looks great on the pew. But no—no he never opens it.”

The church member added that Davis regularly preaches his inspiring sermons from pages of notes, wandering around the stage to punctuate his points with a variety of hand and body movements, the expensive study Bible always left on the ornate wooden pulpit, purely as a piece of decor.

“It adds a nice touch of tradition to the atmosphere,” he noted. “It makes things look, you know, official.”